Caught in Red Tape
by Connie Nervegas
Summary: Raph contemplates his fate after he's caught by the police and accused of murder. (another refurbished story from the old computer of Connie Nervegas)


_I just found this and totally forgot about the idea. I had a rather flimsy plot for a multichapter and I think I'll just finish it as a oneshot scene unless people scream to see more chapters of Raph suffering. I know you people. You sickos who share my joy tormenting this poor creature._

_I went through a Raymond Carver phase five years ago where I tried to look really cool by clipping off the subject of all my sentences while making everything present tense for no reason. This happened during that phase and I'll try to make it a little less literary…_

"So, do you have a name?" It was a stranger's voice. He'd been found. Seen. A benign machine beeped near his head.

He opened his dry mouth to answer and no sound issued.

"Need some water?" asked the business-like voice.

Raph mouthed, "Yeah," but flinched as he wondered if he should trust benevolent water offered by a captor. Something moved near his hand and Raph reached cautiously to his weapons. They were gone. He felt blankets under his limp arms and a cable tugged in his arm. If he were injured, then he wasn't in the lab because there was no way that a stranger would ever offer him water in the lab. Unless Don had built a robot to ask him medical questions so he could play Halo in peace instead of nursing him. Which was not an entirely implausible theory.

"Here are some ice chips. They don't want you to have water yet. Sit up and I'll hand you the cup unless you can't move yet. I'll put them in your mouth I guess." A definite note of disgust in the stranger's voice.

Raph opened his eyes and shut them again. A glare of bright fluorescent light assaulted his eyes. He opened them again and inspected the stranger. It was a man with a black mustache. A human. The man leaned over. Raph slowly pieced together bits of the strangers appearance. A gun on his waist, black uniform, badge. This man offering him water was a cop.

Raph instinctually pulled his arms up to grab the cop. He needed to hit him and escape, but Raph's arms caught halfway up and metal rattled handcuffs on his wrists and the metal guardrails of his bed. The cop said, "You're in police custody. Here's the cup."

The stranger recited a long passage of law about Raph's rights to remain silent and to ask for a lawyer. Raph said, "Fuck you, I don't want a lawyer and you can't shut me up if I want to talk. Another human in the room?"

Raph didn't want anything from the stranger and he didn't want a lawyer. His stomach throbbed and so did his head. The cop pressed the cup into his hand and he held it limply, his eyes narrowly fixed on the cop. The ice chip melted and Raph closed his eyes briefly at the satisfaction.

"What's your name? Do you have a name?" the cop asked, his chair creaking as he shifted his weight. Another human walked briskly down the hall past the open hospital room door and Raph flinched, realizing that scores of humans must have seen him by now. "I'm not explaining anything," Raph said, his eyes going to the sunny window, showing him a landscape of a tar-covered roof and an exhaust vent. "I thought I had a right to remain silent. So fuck you and all the rest of the cops you have waiting around out there."

"Anything you say can later be used against you. Would you like to rephrase that?" The cop talked down to him as if he were a naughty child and Raph briefly imagined Leo in a police uniform, interrogating him.

"I got nothing to say. Where are my weapons?" He tugged on the handcuffs again and pain radiated in all directions from nowhere in particular.

"Huh. Carrying those ninja fork things. You're in big enough trouble without those. What's your name, Kermit?" the cop pulled out a clipboard with some notes, a pen lazily waiting for incriminating words.

Raph's head buzzed with pain and the bright light. He was much more used to dank slime and darkness. The bright white tile made him want to scratch off his skin. "What's your name, asshole?"

"Officer Montgomery. Can the lip, pal."

Raph yanked on the handcuffs, hoping they would give, but the rail of the bed held fast. He tried to move his leg up to kick the cop, but his knee would do nothing but jerk slightly.

"You're going to answer some questions and I'll sit here as long as it takes. First question. What's your name? The sooner you answer, the sooner you get rid of me." The cop spoke without looking at him; just inspected his clipboard.

Raph stared in the opposite direction and looked out the window again at the exhaust vent, wondering if Leo was on the other side waiting to drag him back home. He would rather hear a lecture from Leo, than listen to this guy.

"What's your name? Better question. What the hell are you? They had to call in a veterinarian to help with your surgery." The cop glanced him over with minute curiosity.

"Surgery?" His head whipped back to the cop and the room spun. "What surgery?"

"You were sliced open. Some kind of fight in an alley. You attacked this woman and her little girl."

Raph tried to sit up. "I DID NOT ATTACK NOBODY! I MEAN…" He choked on his dry throat and struggled for words that wouldn't get him killed. "I don't hurt nobody that don't deserve it."

"Who do you hurt then?" The tone was very condescending, as if he were speaking to a child.

Raph's eyes wandered the room as he thought. Had he been drugged? Why did it take so long to think of something to say? "What's your name?" he asked again.

The cop sucked on his teeth. "I told you my name, remember. It's Larry Montgomery. What's your name?"

"You'll have to guess." He sneered and lay back in his bed at an awkward angle, his shell forcing him halfway on his side. "I'm going to get some sleep, so don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."

"Are you an animal?"

His eyes snapped open and he swallowed, full of fear. He didn't know what to do. He must have been injured and laid in the open alley, bleeding and unconscious. A human probably screamed at the monster and then an ambulance hauled him away. He'd failed him in every way possible and wasn't fit to go back to his family. The word seppuku drifted into his mind temporarily before he forced it aside. "What did the vet say I am?"

The cop didn't answer right away. "She didn't know quite what you are. Said you seem mostly human, but you have some… turtle parts. Like the shell and green skin."

"She's definitely not worth her degree if should couldn't figure out something that obvious." Raph closed his eyes, hoping he would fall asleep and block out the anxiety.

"What's your name?" Larry Montgomery asked again.

Raph sighed and tried to steady the ragged choking in his throat. His body wanted to cry. It was all over. They fought so hard for secrecy. To stay out of the judgmental eye of humans and he was the one to fail. Of course it would be him. "Raphael. Hamato Raphael."

"What's your first name?"

Raph furrowed his brow. "What?"

"Is your first name Hamato or Raphael?"

"Raphael. Hamato is Japanese. You're stupider than you look."

"So, Raphael… Do you remember what happened?"

He listened to the buzzing light overhead and the beeping from the medical equipment attached to him. What did happen? He'd been out on patrol at night and just as he thought he might spontaneously fall asleep from boredom, he heard a lady screaming and a little child crying. He remembered looking up to the heavens and thanking the god he didn't believe in for sending him a welcome distraction. A few lame gang members held the woman and her daughter at knife point, probably demanding money. Raph remembered jumping down, taunting the gang members as he usually did and then sent the first one face first into the wall. Then he felt pressure in his side, right in that lucky spot where his shelled armor failed to protect his vulnerable flesh.

"I got stabbed I guess," Raph said. He stuffed his mouth full with ice chips.

Larry pulled out a clipboard and scribbled down a few notes before flipping to another page. "Stabbed is pretty understated. They cut you open all the way down the side like a piñata and that's pretty impressive since you got a shell and all."

Raph lost to a stupid punk wearing ancient Doc Martens and a t-shirt that said "I'm with Stupid" and pointed down at his own dick. He always knew that's how it would go down. The odds were always stacked in favor of the no-talent hack gang members that jumped him every day of his life. The epic and invisible super villains only came around a few times a month. The scales tipped in favor of the punks. If he went down, then the punk must have been alone with the woman and little girl…

"They okay?" Raph asked, glancing back out the window, now hoping his brothers didn't come back for him.

Larry skimmed the page on his clipboard. "Who?"

"The lady and little girl."

The cop looked at him with scrutiny. "You don't remember?"

Raph shook his head his brain rattled in his skull.

"The little girl died of stab wounds. Probably caused from a long metal spike."

"A long metal spike…" Raph said. "That ain't possible."

"How?" The cop raised his eyebrows as if he were listening to a bad joke.

"I wouldn't kill no little girl. You're making this shit up!" Raph yelled, his caution gone. "Where are my weapons? You have them locked up someplace? I didn't stab any little girl and I never have! Where are the guys that tried to rob them? There were three. The geek tried to gut me. They must have done after I was out!" It didn't really matter now that he'd been caught, but he wouldn't be locked up as a child killer when he'd tried to protect them. Lock him up as a freak, but not a killer of the innocent.

"We didn't find anybody else. Just you, the dead woman and the kid and the weapons you're talking about. Not even a trace of anybody else. Forensics will let us know what they find, if anything."

Raph stared at his blanket and didn't talk for a while. "So now what? You going to lock me up in a lab and cut me up?"

"Cut you up?" the cop asked with disgust. "No, we have to figure out if you're under the jurisdiction of New York or not. They need to figure out how to charge you. If no foreign principality claims jurisdiction over you, then you'll probably be up for capital murder. So for now, you're being held on suspicion of double homicide. You're held up in red tape. So after you've healed, you're being transferred to a state prison to await charges." The cop wrote on his clipboard.

"You're going to toss me in prison?" Enough of this shit. He'd just sneak out as soon as the room emptied.

But it was still over and didn't matter. Not only had humans found him, but now he was wanted for murder. Would they look for him if he escaped? Probably. He couldn't bring this disgrace back home to his family.

And he wouldn't take the chance that they found out about any of his brothers or his father.

"Am I on the television yet?" he asked, his voice failing slightly. He probably wouldn't see any of them ever again. Just because of one stupid mistake.

The cop said, "Not yet. It hasn't been publically released. They're going to announced it this afternoon though at a press conference."

"Are they going to show my picture? Will they say what I… I mean, they're going to…" They're going to say I'm a freak and a murderer and show that woman and her curly haired little girl and say I killed them.

The cop picked up a newspaper and opened it lazily. "I don't know what they'll say. I guess we'll be surprised."

He rolled over onto his other side, staring out the window and waited for nightfall. Leo certainly would come to find him that night. But he couldn't go home again. Not after this.


End file.
